A Question Over the Reach of Europe’s ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

The ability for Europe to enforce the region’s privacy rules beyond its borders will be a major part of a report soon to be published by a committee set up by Google.

The report, expected to be released by mid-February 2015, will counsel the company on how to handle Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten standard. The company has complied with roughly 40 percent of the 760,000 link-removal requests that it has received over the last eight months, according to the company’s latest transparency report. The advisory group includes Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who has been a vocal opponent of the European privacy decision, as well as a number of leading data protection academics. But after holding a number of public meetings across Europe, the committee remains divided over whether Google should impose the right-to-be-forgotten decision on all of its global search results, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had yet to be completed.